Brooklyn Dodger

HBO’s new comedy about a writer turned private eye.

The three amigos of Jonathan Ames’s “Bored to Death.”Credit ROBERT RISKO

Chick lit—the range of fiction by women about contemporary city life, friendships, sex, jobs, climbing out of the wreckage of youthful dreams—gets a lot less respect than the male equivalent, which people tend to approach as if it were automatically more artful, more written. Women write “thinly veiled accounts”; men write “romans à clef.” Women writers may have a room of their own, but men who thrash around in front of the mirror and record their every failure, humiliation, moue, and excretion for an audience’s consumption still own the house, even if all they do in it is lie on the couch—and then write about it.

The work of Jonathan Ames, who created the new HBO series “Bored to Death,” lies in this vein of self-fascination and self-conscious inertia. (The show débuted on September 20th, after the season première of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” back, finally, after an absence of two years.) Ames has written novels and essays and has performed in the storytelling forum the Moth and in a one-man Off Off Broadway show that he wrote called “Oedipussy.” He is sometimes tagged as one of the “Jonathans of Brooklyn,” the other two being the novelists Jonathan Safran Foer and Jonathan Lethem. Aside from being successful, prodigious fixtures of the New York literary scene, the three have little in common. Foer and Lethem take risks in their writing; Ames takes risks with his physical self and his public self. He’s into boxing—actually doing it, not just “appreciating” it—and there’s a video on YouTube, shot earlier this month, of Ames onstage at the Brooklyn Book Festival, being paddled by the comedian David Cross while bent over Cross’s lap. (It was part of a showcase for the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series, wherein reader-performers take risks not usually associated with standing behind a lectern in front of an audience and reciting your finished, polished, safely enpaginated work.) Ames clearly likes to put himself out there, partly for the adrenaline rush, partly for the material, and no doubt partly to figure out who he is. That seems to be his mission, or at least his preoccupation: the first lines of almost all his books start with the word “I.”

“Bored to Death” grew out of a story of the same name that Ames published in the magazine McSweeney’s. A first-person narrative by a writer named Jonathan Ames—a “periodic alcoholic” who has just stopped drinking again—the story is about Jonathan’s attempt to scoop himself out of his lethargy and find a sense of purpose, even if it’s one that’s built on falseness. Taking a page, as it were, from the detective novels he loves, he decides to become a detective himself, and puts an ad on Craigslist offering his services. The writing of the story is unenlighteningly detailed and numbingly atonal—possibly in order to illustrate how dull writers can be. A typical passage: “Anyway, I got a thrill at posting the ad, but it was a short-lived thrill. For the first day, I would go and look at my ad, admiring my own handiwork, laughing to myself, wondering if something might happen, almost as if I checked it out enough times, other people would. But then, after about a day, the thrill wore off. It was one more ridiculous thing in a ridiculous life, and, of course, no one called.”

As boring—deliberately or otherwise—as the story “Bored to Death” is, its complications and the narrator’s straightforward voice lend themselves to the screen. In the HBO series, Ames has combined his writing self with his performing self and created something that is about ego without seeming egotistical. (For one thing, Ames does not appear in the show.) Not all the tweaks in the plot work well, but most of the series’ flaws are masked by the excellent casting and the good writing for three central characters: Jonathan (Jason Schwartzman, of Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” and David O. Russell’s “I ♥ Huckabees”); his best friend, Ray (Zach Galifianakis, an appealingly bearish comedian); and George (Ted Danson), the editor-in-chief of a slick New York magazine that Jonathan sometimes writes for. In the story, Jonathan becomes a phony private detective in order to escape the tedium of sobriety—of facing life as it is. In the series, he’s trying to escape the difficulty of writing his second novel. (The real Jonathan has written several novels.) There’s more than a shade of difference between those jumping-off points, with the second one offering more comic possibilities. And in fact, from the very beginning the series has a comic tone that raises it above Ames’s plodding original story.

At the start of the first episode, Jonathan is standing in front of his apartment building, watching moving men fill a truck and hugging himself for comfort: his girlfriend is leaving him. The movers are Israeli, and Jonathan remarks on the unexpectedness of movers being Jewish. One of them says, “What are you, another self-hating New York Jew?” “Mm-hmm,” Jonathan replies, as blandly as if someone had asked him to confirm the time. What’s funny about Jonathan is that his cluelessness about life is so pronounced it might as well be a third arm. He’s empathetic yet selfish, sweet and uncalculating yet infuriating. Guileless and pure, he doesn’t know any better than to tell his ex-girlfriend, Suzanne, that he misses the life she made for him: “I’m living like an animal. I have no toilet paper, no food, no toothpaste.” (Suzanne is played by Olivia Thirlby, for what it’s worth, which isn’t much; all the female characters in the series are underdeveloped, and none of the actresses stand out, except for Kristen Wiig, of “Saturday Night Live,” who is a client of Jonathan’s in one episode.) Schwartzman, a slight man with a flat affect and a speaking voice that’s a light-tenor monotone, pulls off this self-absorption—not with his ex but with the audience. As was the case with the character he played in “Rushmore,” an oddball prep-school student with a rich inner life, viewers can identify with him, because although he’s an underachiever he’s smart and full of desire. He just can’t get it together.

And anytime you feel inclined to smack the emo boy out of Jonathan, you’re distracted by Danson’s sensationally hilarious performance as a flamboyantly narcissistic late-middle-aged quester (a quester with a cushy life style; he asks someone, “What’s a Subaru?”), and by Galifianakis’s comic-book artist, whose understanding of relationships is stuck at the comic-book level. “Bored to Death” is best appreciated as a buddy picture. Jonathan is a low-energy thumb-sucker, Ray is a grump, and George is heedlessly enthusiastic about mixing it up with Jonathan once he finds out that he’s been dabbling in detective work. George is also bored to death, and wants something to make him feel young again. In one episode, Jonathan is closing in on a woman who has slept with and blackmailed a married man, and he pretends to be interested in her himself, so that he can coerce her into giving up the incriminating videotape she made. George wants in on the action—it gives him an excuse to skip a dinner honoring Gay Talese, and anyway, he says, “Gay Talese would want me to do something like this.” He and Ray and Jonathan stop first at a spy store in the Village. (Jonathan has already proved his helplessness in the face of gear: in an earlier episode, when he was embroiled with some Russian gangsters, Ray gave him brass knuckles. Jonathan held the weapon with his fingertips, then threw it at his target. And it actually got the job done.) While the others are shopping for sleuthy stuff, George is in the background, dancing and mugging, entranced by seeing his image on several closed-circuit cameras at once—he can’t get enough of himself.

Danson and Galifianakis steal the show, partly by design. Schwartzman’s character is tentative, provisional, making himself up as he goes along; he’s like a piece of writing as it’s being written—by definition, a work in progress. To balance out the portrait, Ames also uses him as an instrument for making fun of writers’ self-regard. In one scene, the director Jim Jarmusch, who has asked to meet with Jonathan for a possible rewrite job, tells him that he liked his novel. “Dark, funny, perverted, beautiful,” he says. “You must really suffer from the terrifying clarity of your vision.” Jonathan replies, in all seriousness, “Thank you. I do suffer. Thank you.” All three men here are missing something, but, as absurd as they are, they’re not just comic caricatures; they’re the very real clowns you can see performing every day in New York City’s media circus, whose three rings are Me, Myself, and I. ♦

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